Technology
esiegel | September 18, 2016“We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.” -Aristotle Onassis
Welcome back to the end of another big week at Starts With A Bang! There's been a lot of fantastic stories that have gone down, including:
Can stars escape from the galaxy, with planets intact? (for Ask Ethan),
Fossilized relic discovered by Hubble is a link to the Milky Way's past (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Is the cosmic distance ladder flawed?,
That's no comet; that's Pluto!,
How certain are we of the Universe's 'Big Freeze' fate, and
Was Earth born with life already on…
oracknows | September 15, 2016When I first heard that Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, was scheduled to appear on The Dr. Oz Show, my first thought was, basically, “Of course he is. What took him so long?” After all, it’s a crank pairing made in heaven. Given that, I considered it my skeptical blogging duty at least to watch the show, even if I never actually blogged about it. So I dutifully set my DVR to record it, and, after I got home from work, did my evening bike ride and ate dinner, I settled down in front of the television to see if this appearance would be as bad as I predicted in my mind.
I’m…
esiegel | August 28, 2016"Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings." -Yuri Milner
It’s been another big week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories covering the Universe near and far. First off, thanks to our generous Patreon supporters, we have a brand new podcast live today, on whether the Big Bang was really the beginning of the Universe.
It's 19 minutes of your life well spent, trust me. There are lots of amazing things that happened, including a candidate for "story of the year" (so…
gregladen | August 10, 2016Several dozen nonpartisan organizations have joined together to ask for a Science Debate in the current campaign. The debate would address major issues in science, engineering, health and the environment
This is part of an effort that has been going on for several election cycles, with a certain degree of success.
More than 10 million scientists and engineers are represented by the organizations that have joined in this effort. They have provided a list of twenty major issues, and are encouraging journalists and voters to press the candidates on them during the 2016 U.S. Presidential…
esiegel | July 22, 2016“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” –Gene Roddenberry
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, our first science fiction adventure that promised a positive view of the future, ushered in by technology and humanity's best traits. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity.…
gregladen | July 13, 2016Manga is the Japanese sounding but not used so much in Japan term for a form of cartooning art that has its roots from before World War II but that emerged in its common form during the post war Occupation period. Early used in political cartooning, Manga style drawing is now used for a wide range of expression, and has a place in illustrating a wide range of products, read by Japanese citizens of all sorts and ages. Outside of Japan, Manga is the starting point for the wildly popular Anime style of expression, which of course brings us to...
Pokeman go
But, we are not here to talk about…
esiegel | June 26, 2016“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.” -Cesare Pavese
After another Universe-investigating week here at Starts With A Bang, I'm pleased to make two simple but very satisfying announcements:
The latest Starts With A Bang podcast, on Interstellar Travel, will be going live next week, so look for it soon!
I just signed a contract to write my second book, on the real-life science and technology of the Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation franchises!
So if you've got comments on either of those, or suggestions or whatever, you know what to do.…
jdupuis | June 22, 2016One of the key faults of the Harper Conservatives' science policy was their emphasis on applied research to the detriment of basic, curiosity driven research. Obviously there needs to be a balance between any government's approach to those two kinds of research, neither polar opposite is appropriate. But the Conservatives were way out of wack with their policy, significantly favouring commercially-driven, industrial-partnership-focused, applied research. The signature policy in that vein was their transformation of the National Research Council into a Concierge to Industry.
Thankfully the…
gregladen | June 13, 2016Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher)
Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.
The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…
oracknows | June 8, 2016Those of us living in Michigan who support science-based medicine have been forced to deal with a bill that, if passed, would grant practitioners of unscientific “medicine” a wide scope of practice—almost as wide as that of primary care practitioners such as pediatricians, internists, and family practice doctors. I’m referring to HB 4531, a bill that would license naturopaths who graduated from “accredited” programs. If this bill were to pass, the only difference between the scope of practice of primary care physicians and naturopaths would be that naturopaths wouldn’t be allowed to prescribe…
esiegel | May 25, 2016"By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface." -Buzz Aldrin
When the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars in August of 2012, it seemed that we had the ultimate successor to Opportunity in place. That older, over-engineered rover is still going after more than 12 years on the red planet, and Curiosity is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of technology: nuclear powered,…
esiegel | May 1, 2016"Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong." -Allan Sandage
As April leaves us and May commences here at Starts With A Bang, I'm so pleased to inform you that amazing things are happening! Thanks to the support of everyone on Patreon, we're over 95% of the way towards our next goal: the creation of the most accurate, beautiful, scientific timeline of the Universe's history poster ever made! We've also covered the following topics this past week for you to ring in on:
Could an atmosphere slow down a…
esiegel | April 15, 2016"Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings." -Yuri Milner
In one of the boldest initiatives ever announced, billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are working on developing a "Breakthrough Starshot" project, where an advanced laser array will power a sail-driven spacecraft to speeds exceeding 60,000 km/s, taking it to the nearest stars within a single human lifetime.
A…
pharyngula | April 5, 2016
Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he's very impressed with genetic engineering (he's a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We're going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we'll just…
kkrisberg | March 18, 2016In another example of the value of investing in public health, a recent study finds that PulseNet, a national foodborne illness outbreak network, prevents about 276,000 illnesses every year, which translates into savings of $507 million in medical costs and lost productivity. That’s a pretty big return on investment for a system that costs just $7.3 million annually to operate.
Created 20 years ago and coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PulseNet includes 83 state and federal laboratories and identifies about 1,750 disease clusters every year. It works by linking…
carlyo | February 19, 2016As a girl growing up in the 1950s in Harlem, X-STEM Speaker Dr. Patricia Bath became fascinated by newspaper accounts of the humanitarian work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer (who treated lepers in Africa). That, coupled with encouragement and motivation from her family doctor and her parents, fueled her desire to become a physician.
She would not only go on to fulfill her dream, but make medical history as well. Dr. Bath, a noted ophthalmologist and laser scientist, is especially known for discovering and inventing the revolutionary device and technique for cataract surgery known as the laserphaco…
gregladen | February 11, 2016First, what is a gravitational wave?
I find it interesting that some people are expressing difficulty in understanding what a gravitational wave is, as though everybody (who is not a physicist) has a perfectly good understanding of what any kind of wave is. We don't need to go too deeply beneath the surface, as it were, to understand this well enough to be amazed at the discovery, but not well enough to get a job being a Gravitational Waveologist.
Imagine a perfectly flat pond. Imagine throwing a stone out into the middle of the pond. Now imagine ripples, tiny waves, spreading out from the…
milhayser | January 11, 2016It was high times for the Rebel Alliance at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983). Across the galaxy, crowds rejoiced at the destruction of the second Death Star and the apparent defeat of Emperor Palpatine. Princess Leia Organa, who two films earlier had seen her home planet exploded for sport, was re-united with a twin brother she never knew she had, becoming aware of her own Force sensitivity, and in love with a swashbuckling hero who would later father her son. It was a resounding victory, and deservedly so, even if Ewoks had to help.
The Force Awakens begins thirty years later, yet…
aardvarchaeology | January 11, 2016
2015 was an amazing year for scifi movies. The Martian, Fury Road, Force Awakens. And I hear Ex Machina is good too?
Tess Parks's "Life Is But A Dream" sounds exactly like Mazzy Star.
Tolkien Society flea market / fundraiser, late 80s. I'm in my larper tunic and baggy-sleeved shirt. An old lady loudly asks her friend, "Was that a boy in a dress?"
Jack the Ripper was into one night stabs.
Signed off on Jr's first ID. "You are the bows from which your children / as living arrows are sent forth."
Deezer took a look at my druggy favourites, then played me "White Rabbit" and "Eight Miles High".…
esiegel | December 20, 2015"Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit... Santa, who was jolly - but, let's face it, he was also very judgmental." -Julia Sweeney
Everyone loves to point out the holes in the Santa Claus theory. After all, how could one person with a sled, powered by eight flying reindeer, deliver presents in one night to hundreds of millions of households all over the world? And yet, every Christmas morning, children wake up to find they did, in fact, get a visit from Santa.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Glogger, of the Santa Claus parade in Toronto, 2007.…